Fascination with fabric

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There are many layers to Filomena Coppola and her work,
writes Louise Bellamy.

It was growing up in the Italian community of Mildura - "where
we were denigrated wogs and outsiders" and "encouraged to
relinquish our culture and 'be' Australian" - to which artist
Filomena Coppola attributes her fascination with fabric.

Her parents grew grapes, made pasta and went to church, but it
was observing her mother intricately embroidering tablecloths and
bed linen that most profoundly influenced Coppola's art.

Her latest show at Dickerson Gallery, her 10th solo exhibition,
comprises 21 dry-pastel-on-paper works in which she applies up to
10 layers of colour to replicate thickly woven fabric, which she
integrates with "emotional elements" such as tongues and lips.

Sitting in her Thornbury studio, where she lives with her
sister, two nephews and one niece, Coppola, 38, recalls a moment at
the age of 25 when she saw a photograph of her mother taken at the
same age "and saw that my face was so bound with her image, that
her hands, which I'd observed embroidering as a child, were now my
hands making fabric in different ways".

Her art has always mimicked that bond. Her prints, her main
medium in the early '90s ("until they limited the colour I wanted
to render"), comprised superimpositions of Greco-Roman columns,
representing her Italian background, on patterns based on the work
of British printmaker William Morris, the quintessential
Anglophile. "Although they're quite different in nature, the
columns and wallpaper create a harmonious dialogue, which is the
point I wanted to get across about cultures."

It was in 1997, on a Rosamund McCulloch scholarship in Paris,
that Coppola visited relatives in Italy, who gave her a bolt of
fabric that had been prepared for her mother's dowry. Her interest
in fabric took flight, she says. "My family had grown the flax,
spun it, then woven it into a continuous bolt of linen that was to
be used for mattress covers for her bridal bed."

She has since centred on the repetition of this thread, both
literally through rendering fabric, and metaphorically through her
cultural heritage.

Coppola estimates that each of the 15 pastels in the show,
measuring 80 centimetres by 120 centimetres, takes hundreds of
hours to complete. And it's the space between the heavily worked
seam of fabric and the "element" that is most important, she
says.

"The pomegranate seeds in Submerge represent fertility;
the lips in Chardin's Strawberries acknowledge the
luscious fruit; and the leaf forms in Bruise and
Frosted Dreams highlight the intrusion of nature in this
manufactured environment."

Coppola has spent the past three years in Australia and the US
exploring new ways of rendering the connections and disjunctions of
life as a migrant. She recalls returning from Europe after close to
a year speaking only French and Italian, and losing some of her
English vocabulary. Since then, she explains, she continues her
journey to capture "the outsider from within" through the threads
that culturally tie - and divide - her.

Filomena Coppola

WHERE Dickerson Gallery, RichmondWHEN Today until July 3HOW MUCH FreeDETAILS Tel: 9429 1569